You can only live on the seasonal's salary if you have no bills and no family. When I was in school between the Forest Service seasons I used to be able to collect unemployment, as long as I signed a form saying I'd quit and go to work if I was offered a job in my field. Not many fire fighting or forestry jobs offered in the winter in Washington state. I was the first woman hired to work in the woods on my district, so it was hard at first to get the extra overtime, but I finally did, and it helped also. (That's a topic for a different thread.) I did quit a couple of times, but was far enough along in the quarter that I could finish the classes through the mail.

It was frustrating as an Interpretive Naturalist professional (this was part of my Parks and Rec degree, by the way) to see that the only way to get above the federal GS-9 ceiling was to stop being a naturalist or historian and start being a paper pusher. It's like any of the teaching professions--if you want to make more money, you must give up what you love and become an administrator. It's a great loss to those professions.

SRS